There's an approval process to create an account, and I just got mine after waiting a couple of months.

The game populates a map of the real world around you with energy items that you can pick up, and portals that you can capture. You can only access these things by walking near them. Among other possibilities, it seems like it's going to help me get some exercise.

I just got my invite into Ingress today. Took "only" a month to get it, lol.

I completed the tutorial missions and then joined the Enlightened, although there seems to be higher numbers within the Resistance. I guess I'm a sucker for the underdogs. As well, I think green on black looks cooler than blue on black.

Once I get some free time tonight, I'll go out for a walk and see if it's possible to hack and link a portal or two near me.

You can rewind the story back to November 1 and try to piece the parts of the puzzle together. As simple the game itself looks, an MMO "capture /control the node" concept in real-life, the story behind it looks deep, if not convoluted.

I like the Ingress concept and I also like the way it builds a community within the gamers that play it locally via a chat-bar/progress-report that runs at all times in the background. As well, it also has people finding a use for Google+ for once. :)

Have to say I've been playing only sporadically for now. I'm Resistance, and while we do outnumber Enlightenment players, most of my surrounding area is solid green.

I found that portals in my immediate area are too well reinforced for me to hack most of the time, and there aren't that many of them near my office. So I can't really pick any portals up by walking at work, which is disappointing. The only thing I can do on walks is collect energy, but that doesn't help if I'm maxed.

There is a library with a blue portal near my apartment that I can detour to while driving home from work, but driving there feels like defeating the purpose of using the game as an exercise incentive. I did launch the game one night when I was walking through downtown Austin -- much to the amusement / annoyance of my wife. There are a ton of blue portals in a small area, but unless I make a point of driving down there regularly, I'm not likely to benefit from them.

And upon waking up this morning and logging into the Intel Map local chat I noticed that at least 3 or 4 fresh new portals had popped up out of nowhere overnight. Pretty cool.

And if you haven't checked out the Ingress Intel Map, it's a must for strategic planning before you head out so you're not walking around blindly... http://www.ingress.com/intel

Where I am, the Vancouver area is pretty much controlled by the Resistance, so as a level 1 Enlightened player, I feel your pain, as I have yet to overtake any portals near me. All I can really do is hack and try to farm whatever drops from the hack, as that's the only way to gain any AP exp points for now. I don't worry about defensive shields draining me of XM exotic matter, as it's pretty easy to regain.

But then again, those new portals are still fresh and barely have any defences on them. One of them has just one level 1 resonator, so it might be worth the trip if I can it there during my morning coffee.

Actually, I might do that right now. :-D

Keith...

PS- Check out this youtube video. It's an Ingress player who is trying to give an overview of some gameplay on location (and learning as he's do so). The best part of the video is near the end when he discovers that he's not alone (real life PvP?).

So earlier today, I had some free time to take some pictures around the Yaletown area in downtown Vancouver (an area with only a single portal to play with).

After taking the pics, I ran into a coffee shop to recharge my phone and to submit the locations to the in-game "NIA Special Ops" for potential future portals. And after submitting over a dozen locations, I turned on the Ingress app to check out the local chat, and I noticed a new portal near me, a grey colored "neutral" portal.

And another a few blocks away, and another, and another...

I clicked on the portals to see what was up, and saw that they were all places that ZipCars are located. I grabbed my latte and ran to the first portal and claimed it. Huh, I didn't know they had ZipCars here, I thought to myself.

The same thoughts ran in my head after I claimed my second, third and fourth neutral portals. Location based advertising in action.

And the local Intel chat was going crazy. "Somebody run to Cambie & Smithe!" "Hurry and grab Pacific & Drake before the Resistance gets there!"

Not only were people aware of what was being advertised, but they were RUNNING (if not SPRINTING) to its brick & motar location. Frikkin' genius.

Free Ingress codes are being given away in a viral campaign called #dropdeadday on Google+. To get the code, you'll have to find it "in real life". Apparently they are giving away 100 codes today in various places around the world...

and having some fun with it. The battles going on in my neck of the woods between Enlightenment and Resistance are amusing and fun, and sometimes quite intense. The amount of portals around here is pretty high, and ofcourse, there are more cropping up all the time (especially in the daysafter the intel got released with the "front" organization for researchbeing a health-oriented juice purveyor... suddenly, every Jamba Juice hasa portal).

Have mostly been just dabbling, though -- am only level four at this point-- but have enjoyed finding remote portals that take some hiking to get to.

Some of the add-ins that they're incorporating really kick things up a notchfor playing (not to mention the fact that they finally optimized the Intelmap for display on the smaller sized phone screens).

My guess is that once this game leaves beta stages and goes wild, they'll be incorporating this either wholesale, by parts, or some facsimile. Butfor now, it definitely helps the playability and players' strategy.